OS X 10.11

My colleague Timothy Reavis shared just a couple of years ago how you can customize the icons of apps on your Mac. On the other hand, it would seem the process to do this has changed slightly in OS X El Capitan.

In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you a method that works on Apple’s latest operating system release for Mac.

Have you ever woken your Mac up from sleep, and couldn’t find the mouse pointer among the mess of windows and desktop icons. We’ve all been there before.

Starting with El Capitan, macOS is hoping to help out with that, courtesy of a brand new addition to the operating system. It’s certainly not a headline feature, but macOS can help you quickly locate your mouse or trackpad pointer by simply shaking your mouse or swiping your finger back and forth on the trackpad in quick succession.

Watch our video inside to see how it works. We’ll also show you where to go to disable the feature in System Preferences.

Now that OS X El Capitan is officially out, it’s time to update. First, though, make sure you read our post on how to prepare for OS X El Capitan. It covers basic information, such as using Time Machine to backup your data.

Once you do that, it’s time to download OS X El Capitan. You can do that from the Mac App Store, and like past OS X updates, it’s totally free. Fire up the Mac App Store, and get to downloading!

Tomorrow, Apple is releasing its yearly update to its desktop operating system, OS X 10.11 El Capitan. It rightly caps off a long month of activity that started with Apple’s media event, and from there featured the release of iOS 9, followed by the release of the iPad mini 4, two new iPhone’s—the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, and culminates with tomorrow’s launch.

It’s been a busy month of announcements and releases for Apple, and it just feels right that Apple ends the month with an update to the platform that really started it all—the Mac. Tomorrow, likely around 10AM PST, Apple will release OS X El Capitan. It’s the follow up to OS X Yosemite, and as its name suggests, it shares a lot in common with that release.

What should you do to prepare for the release? Follow our simple guide for more info.

Apple has seeded the golden master version of the latest update to its desktop operating system, OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The update, which comes with a build number of 15A282b, is now available on Apple’s Developer Center for registered developers. It is also available for public beta testers via Apple’s beta website.

Like the iOS 9 GM seed, which also was released today, this will likely be the final version of the OS X 10.11 beta before it is released to the public.

Following the release of new watchOS 2 and iOS 9 betas, Apple on Tuesday seeded the second beta of OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The build is labeled as 15A204h, and is available to registered developers via the Updates section of the Mac App Store or through Apple’s Developer Center.

Introduced two weeks ago at WWDC, OS X El Capitan is the next major version of Apple’s Mac operating system. The update does not include a ton of new features, but instead builds on top of last year’s OS X Yosemite with a number of performance and stability improvements.

Like Google Chrome and other browsers have been able to do for some time, Starting with OS X El Capitan, Safari now allows you to pin tabs. But pinned tabs work a little differently in Safari for Apple’s in-development OS update than they do in other browsers. In this post, we’ll walkthrough the new tab pinning features, and show you what’s different about the way Apple goes about its implementation.

It’s no secret Mac users are always more or less complaining about various Wi-Fi problems.

But if Apple’s support forums and the Interwebs are an indication, the level of annoyance with the networking stack in Apple’s desktop and mobile operating systems has seemingly skyrocketed following the release of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite in the fall of last year.

Indeed, my MacBook Air running Yosemite drops Wi-Fi connection several times per day and takes about thirty seconds to re-connect to my home Wi-Fi after waking from sleep. Before Yosemite, I would be online literally as soon as I opened the lid.

Having installed El Capitan on my MacBook Air yesterday along with iOS 9 on my iPad Air, I’m happy to report that the vast majority of Wi-Fi problems plaguing users have become a thing of the past, here’s why.

Monday’s WWDC 2015 keynote talk was a jam-packed day of announcements that included iOS 9, OS X El Capitan, watchOS 2, Apple Music, the News app and updates to Apple Pay, so much so that Tim Cook had to immediately cut to the chase and skip his opening round of business updates (“Everything is going fine”, he joked).

There just wasn’t enough time to talk about every little enhancement and nice-to-have so Apple execs focused on big ones that make for great headlines while relegating a bunch of platform updates, that mostly matter to developers anyway, to a single slide.

My colleague Cody already compiled an interesting list of nearly three-dozen features in iOS 9 that Apple didn’t talk about during the keynote. If you’ve found his post compelling, you may be interested in my list of technological improvements in OS X El Capitan that Apple didn’t show on stage.

Following promotional footage for Apple Music that the Cupertino company posted to its YouTube channel along with the inspirational ‘App Effect’ video, the entire keynote presentation has now been uploaded to iTunes and made available to everyone in the form of a video podcast.

In case you haven’t had a chance to sit through the whole keynote talk yesterday, you can now download the video to your Mac, iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and watch it on your own time.

App Extensions have given developers the means to extend Apple’s mobile operating system by infusing their app’s functionality into the Notification Center’s Today view, Share sheet options and actions, keyboards, cloud storage services and Photos.

App Extensions have been universally acclaimed and a lot ink has been spilled in writing about custom keyboards in iOS 8. As an iPhone photography fan, I was way more excited about App Extensions within the context of Photos for iOS.

There was just one problem: OS X Yosemite doesn’t support App Extensions in Photos for Mac. Thankfully, newly announced OS X 10.11 El Capitan saw to that, meaning now developers of photo-editing apps can provide their own filters and editing tools in Photos for Mac.

Just like the rumors have predicted, OS X 10.11 El Capitan is short on major headline-grabbing features Apple fans have grown accustomed to.

Instead, the Snow Leopard-style update focuses on speeding up everyday computing with such enhancements as graphics acceleration through Metal, faster apps enabled by Swift 2, battery saving technologies, stronger security and much more.

That means you won’t have to break the bank to buy the latest and greatest hardware from Apple in order to run El Capitan because it will run just fine on most recent Macs, according to the official OS X 10.11 release notes that Ars Technica unearthed today.